Police Kept Nearly 500 Body Parts Despite Cases Being Solved

Almost 500 body parts have been stored by police in England, Wales and Northern Ireland since 1960 in cases where inquiries have closed, a report has found.

Police forces are able to keep samples after post-mortem exams if there is a "legal requirement" to do so, but a report by the Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) found no record as to why 492 samples were kept.

Force chiefs apologised to grieving families as Acpo revealed that investigators "may have wrongly assumed that the human tissue seized at the post-mortem examination had been disposed of by the medical profession or by some other means".

Deputy Chief Constable Debbie Simpson, who led the audit, said there was "no nationally agreed policy to deal with such items at the conclusion of the investigation".

Some relatives may not have been made aware that detectives had kept the remains but officers are now in the process of "sensitively" dealing with the human tissue, she added.